Frustration with Dough Tearing

[bdprops]

After years of weekly experiments with my pizza, I've gotten my crust almost perfect (to my idea of perfection at least), but with one frustrating problem... the dough stretches too thin in places (or even tears). I've been able to get around this by rolling the dough, but then I lose the rim I get when hand tossing/stretching.

Here's the dough recipe I'm using:

4 cups flour (currently the Caputo 00, but want to try AT next since I'm using a home oven at 525)
1 tsp salt
2 tsp active dry yeast
1 tbsp sugar
12 ounces warm water
1 tbsp olive oil

I have been mixing for 10 minutes as I was taught years ago, but after reading through the posts here, it seems like I should be aiming for more like 3 minutes?

I then ball the dough an put it in the fridge for 24 hours.

It comes out for about 90 minutes before shaping, which I've had to do in two steps to get it stretched thin enough (stretch, wait 10 minutes, stretch again). By the second stretching, I have no problem getting it into shape, save for it stretching in a non-uniform way, and sometimes tearing.

The taste is AWESOME, but the tearing as I pull them out or serve them up SUCKS!

I'd like to experiment with some of the NY dough recipes here, but I really want to figure out this nagging problem first with a crust I already like before moving on to try others.

Any ideas where my mistake(s) is/are? Thanks so much... the help on this forum is fantastic!

[The Dough Doctor]

BD;
Your problem is not unique, infact it is really quite common. A good method to use in opening the dough, so it opens without the excessively thick and thin areas across the center is to first pre-flatten the dough ball, in your case using a rolling pin. Open the dough ball to about 2/3 of the desired finished diameter using only just a couple passes with the rolling pin as too many passes will only serve to tighten the dough making further opening more difficult. Once you have the dough pre-flattened, set the dough piece aside to rest for a couple minutes, then begin opening the dough by hand in your normal manner. We just finished with our annual pizza seminar last week and I showed this procedure to a good number of our first time students, without exception, all were opening the dough really well within just a few minutes. This is also the way I open my dough when I make pizza at home.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

[bdprops]

Thanks so much! I'll give this a try and see if it fixes the problem. Are there any other areas, either in recipe or dough prep that can make this problem better or worse? I see guys at the pizzeria give it one good toss and have a perfect 24" pizza... mine just wants to tear trying to make a 16". I recently switched to high gluten flour (Caputo 00), and would have thought I would have a more resilient dough, but instead it wants to stretch too thin.

Thanks again for your generous advice!!

[AimlessRyan]

00 is not high gluten flour. Not even close. So that explains a lot of your confusion.

[The Dough Doctor]

If you can get it, General Mills All Trumps flour at 14+% protein content is the pack leader, but the Pillsbury Bread Flour available at many supermarkets comes in at about 12.2% protein content, plenty strong to hand toss. Check the bag labels for different flours at the supermarket, you want to look for a label indicating 12 to 13, or more grams of protein for 100-grams of flour weight.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor